Job Portals 4.0: Automating The Recruitment Process

Do you know how long job portals and job sites have been around? Almost as long as the World Wide Web itself. The first job portal went live in 1994, five years after we started typing ‘www’ into rudimentary web browsers. In the 24 years since, job portals have graduated from job boards full of text postings, to platforms with search capabilities that can incorporate job ads from other websites.

However, the process of recruiting has not changed. Recruiters still manually post the same job ad on a number of job boards, and then wait for the flood of emails to come in. This is even more pervasive for high-volume recruitment, where multiple candidates are needed for an event or job. Recruiters then move on to slowly screening out applicants and scheduling interview after interview for the shortlisted candidates, hoping for a high show-up rate.

Aren’t you tired of this process? We know we are.

Recruitment 4.0: The “Next Wave Of Hiring”

Every industry in the world has been affected by the 4.0 paradigm. eCommerce has its predictive purchasing, manufacturing has Industry 4.0, and recruitment, too, has Recruitment 4.0. As mentioned in a 2011 article by ERE, Recruitment 4.0 would aim to build upon the database generated by job seekers on job portals to help recruiters hire faster and easier, without the need for costly recruitment agencies.

In the 7 years since that article was published, we have indeed learnt how to use databases of job seekers on websites and social media such as LinkedIn to actively recruit. Part-timers and interns can be hired directly instead of requiring recruitment agencies. Despite that, recruiters are still doing the manual work to hire, without the support of technologies and systems that other industries have.

That doesn’t make the recruiter’s life any easier.

So, what do we suggest?

Automation and Job Portals 4.0

In the 4.0 version of job portals, the focus should be on making recruiters’ lives easier, helping us to hire more efficiently. That includes expediting the sourcing, screening, and interview process that is our job scope, without removing them completely.

What this means is, we believe in automating the repetitive and mindless processes of each section of the hiring process. We don’t want to eliminate job portals completely; job portals are still essential to getting a large list of applicants. However, job portals should be moving on from purely providing a place where people can “spray and pray”, as it were.

The goal that Job Portals 4.0 should be working towards, is making the process of getting the right applicants and candidates from the job portal into the interview seats, as smooth as possible. For example, the screening of online applicants shouldn’t be manual. Many applicants apply without reading basic requirements such as the minimum years of experience, and should not be included in the stack of CVs you have to sift through. In fact, CVs themselves aren’t necessary, especially when it comes to the hiring of part-timers and contract staff, where the need to provide a resume can deter candidates from applying at all.

Automation would come in handy here, then, as recruiters should be able to set up filters for candidates within a system that allows them to only view the applicants who are qualified. Further profiling can also be done in a system where candidates can be ranked based on how ‘perfect’ a candidate they seem, based on the requirements. Recruiters can then start with the most qualified, and work their way down.

For recruiters with a current potential list of part-timers, too, automation would be very useful. Instead of slowly asking candidates if they can start work immediately or work on the next three Saturdays, recruiters should be able to click one button that will mass-send these questions to all shortlisted candidates, with the replies and conversation automatically tracked.

In the end, we’re looking for a new revolution in recruitment. Instead of focusing only on the ability to connect with potential job seekers, job portals should become communities and platforms where job seekers and recruiters can engage in conversation, while also providing the recruiter with all the information he needs to make a hiring decision quickly. Automation is a key method you can use to accomplish that.

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